Telltale Games Offers up Some Tales From the Borderlands Details at SXSW

March 10, 2014 Written by Jason Dunning

As promised, Telltale Games gave out the first details surrounding their upcoming collaboration with Gearbox, Tales From the Borderlands. Set to be available for download later this year, you can watch this 47-minute video from SXSW to learn how Telltale and Gearbox came together, get the first look at how the story will be told, and more:

If you don’t feel like watching the entire video, Polygon compiled some of the more interesting details to come from the panel, including how Tales From the Borderlands: A Telltale Games Series (we’ll shorten it to Tales From the Borderlands) will feature the two protagonists you saw in the debut trailer.

Taking place on Pandora, Fiona, a con artist, and Rhys, a cybernetically-enhanced Hyperion company man, will be fully playable by you as they retell a story from the future. As Kevin Bruner of Telltale puts it though, “You never really play what actually happened, you’re playing this Big Fish version of what happened.”

Next up, Harrison Pink from Telltale talked up how Tales From the Borderlands will still have you making decisions, but unlike the ones in The Walking Dead, they will be happier options to choose from, as this game will be more humorous than what you’ve seen recently with other Telltale games.

Despite not really talking about mechanics, or showing any gameplay footage, Pink did reveal that Tales From the Borderlands will feature shooting “in a Telltale kind of way.” You’ll also be able to use Fiona and Rhys’ unique abilities in the game, which include Rhys’ robotic arm, allowing you to hack electronics.

Bruner then discussed how you can’t have a Borderlands game without over-the-top action:

It’s a Borderlands game, there has to be crazy stuff going on. I’m glad that people recognize it in [The Wolf Among Us], because figuring out how to do action and storytelling at the same time has been tricky to do without reverting to a traditional, run-around video game. We want to keep things cinematic, and have action sequences tell stories. We got better between Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us, and I think we’ll get better as we move into Borderlands, because you have to have crazy, over-the-top action scenes, or it’s not a Borderlands game.

Although the story will be focused around Fiona, Rhys, and other characters on Pandora, Telltale confirmed that Tales From the Borderlands will feature appearances by people you’ve encountered in Borderlands and Borderlands 2.

Are you excited for what Telltale can do with the Borderlands universe? Let us know in the comments below.